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By Root 1912 0

as an eighteenth-century lady, bumped into a Valkyrie, with breastplate and horned helmet, who turned out to be English. Her name, she said, was Marie Stopes. She was studying at the University. Dorothy was interested. She said she hadn’t known women were admitted. They aren’t, said Marie Stopes. In my department I am the only woman. I am a palaeobotanist. I study the sex of fossil cycads. It is very interesting. If one, then more, Dorothy thought. At this point Joachim Susskind joined them and recognised Miss Stopes, who had taken an unprecedented first-class Honours degree in Botany—in one year, moreover—at University College. Dorothy suddenly felt silly in grey silk and velvet. She should be in a classroom. But then, here was the successful Miss Stopes, dressed as an ungainly Valkyrie, and slightly drunk.

Anselm Stern and his family had built a balefire in their courtyard—a cheerful, flickering construction, not mountainous, not a furnace. They all danced round it, and, as it subsided, jumped over the ashes. Anselm had given them all blue flowers, Rittersporn, larkspurs, to throw into the embers—“And all your cares and troubles with them,” he said.

Dorothy had two memories from that day which never left her. The first was of dancing with her new father, with Anselm Stern, a kind of fast whirling polka, round the Spiegelgarten. She caught sight of herself in a mirror—her hair had come loose—she looked wild—and she suddenly remembered waltzing in South Kensington with her other father, her new dress, his hand on her waist, and everything that had come from it. Because of that dance, this dance. She missed a step, and Anselm supported her. He looked down at her worried face, and, for the first time, carefully kissed her on the brow.

Dorothy’s second memory was of going indoors to find a lavatory, and having found one to be occupied, searching for another. And she came upon two people, standing closely together. They were Wolfgang and Griselda. Dorothy saw that both of them had closed their eyes. They had not seen her. She went back round the corner she had just turned. She said nothing to Griselda, and Griselda said nothing to her.

III

THE SILVER AGE

32

Backwards and forwards, both. The Edwardians knew they came after something. The sempiternal Queen was gone, in all her manifestations, from the squat and tiny widow swathed in black crape and jet beads, to the gold-encrusted, bedizened, crowned idol who was brought out at durbars and jubilees. That pursed little mouth was silent for ever. Her long-dead mate, who had most seriously cared for the lives of working-men and for the wholesome and beautiful and proliferating arts and crafts, persisted beside her in the name of the unfinished Museum, full of gold, silver, ceramics, bricks and building dust. The new King was an elderly womaniser, genial and unhealthy, interested in oiling the wheels of diplomacy with personal good sense, in racehorses, in the daily shooting of thousands upon thousands of bright birds and panting, scrambling, running things, in the woodlands and moors of Britain, in the forests and mountains of Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Russia. It was a new time, not a young time. Skittishly, it cast off the moral anguish and human responsibility of the Victorian sages Lytton Strachey was preparing to mock. The rich acquired motor cars and telephones, chauffeurs and switchboard operators. The poor were a menacing phantom, to be helped charitably, or exterminated expeditiously. The sun shone, the summers broiled and were brilliant. The land, in places, was running with honey, cream, fruit fools, beer, champagne.

They looked back. They stared and glared backwards, in an intense, sometimes purposeful nostalgia for an imagined Golden Age. There were many things they wanted to go back to, to retrieve, to reinhabit.

They wanted to go back to the earth, to the running rivers and full fields and cottage gardens and twining honeysuckle of Morris’s Nowhere. They wanted to live in cottages (real cottages, which meant old stone, mossy cottages) and grow their